There has been a decline of 52,000 on-farm workers since 2020, reported Statistics Canada.
The total now is 225,000.
Jennifer Wright, executive director of the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council said the decline comes from an aging workforce, retirements, lack of young people taking agriculture jobs and competition from employers in other businesses.
She said the decline doesn’t mean there are fewer jobs, but that farmers are having more difficulty recruiting workers.
She said the numbers may also be missing temporary foreign workers, but Statistics Canada’s spokesman defended its survey numbers as consistently reliable and accurate.
The decline is not new. In 1993 the total was 400,000, but the decline has accelerated over the last few years.
